The present invention is in the field of ticket processing and issuing, and more particularly concerns a ticket processing terminal with a single-cylinder advancing mechanism for advancing a ticket through successive stages of ticket processing.
In the prior art, ticket advancing mechanisms have been used in ticket terminals for moving a ticket through various stages of processing in a terminal. For example, the DM-4 Datamark ticket issuing terminal, manufactured and sold by the assignee of this patent application, includes a ticket advancing mechanism having a pair of spaced-apart, parallel ticket rollers which move a ticket in a figure-eight pattern for processing on both sides of the ticket. By processing is meant the writing of information onto and reading of information off of one or more faces of a ticket. The ticket advancing mechanism of the Datamark terminal can be understood with reference to U.S. patent application No. 670,156 (now U.S. Pat. No. 4,677,553), which is assigned to the assignee of the subject patent application and incorporated herein by reference.
Other mechanisms for feeding documents during processing of the documents are exemplified in U.S. Pat. No. 3,508,032 of MacDuffee et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 4,251,000 of Templeton. In the MacDuffee patent, a document is fed along a longitudinal path, written on, guided onto an exit path which is perpendicular to the feed path, and fed from the exit path. No provision is made in the MacDuffee system for reading information on the printed card. The Templeton system concerns an apparatus for reading documents at a high speed along a substantially linear pathway.
When the need exists for printing a document and then reading what has been printed in order to verify the printing, it should be evident that devices in which ticket processing is conducted along a linear ticket path must be provided with increased path lengths or reciprocating mechanisms to accommodate the added processing functions.
An effort to maximize the processing functions, while minimizing the ticket processing path length in a ticket processing terminal, is well represented by the DM-4 Datamark terminal of the assignee. The DM-4 terminal is especially significant in that the compact figure-eight ticket pathway permits processing on both faces of a ticket. However, in applications where extreme compactness of a terminal is required, the requirement for two drive rollers to form the ticket processing pathway might limit the use of the DM-4 terminal.
Therefore, there is an evident need for a ticket terminal with a processing mechanism which will further reduce the size of the terminal by minimizing the space required for movement of a ticket undergoing processing, yet which permits the terminal to retain as many ticket processing functions as possible.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a compact yet multifunctional ticket advancing mechanism.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a compact ticket advancing mechanism having a processing pathway of length sufficient to perform a multiplicity of ticket processing functions.